This one number is significant for autonomous driving industry

"Four terabytes is the estimated amount of data that an autonomous car will generate in about an hour and a half of driving – or the amount of time a typical person spends in their car each day."ETAuto | Updated: April 17, 2017, 13:30 IST

SANTA CLARA, CALIFORNIA: There is one number in particular which has a lot of significance for the autonomous drivingindustry and that is 4 terabytes (TB).

In a statement, says Kathy Winter, vice president and general manager of the Automated Driving Solutions Division at Intel Corporation, "Four terabytes is the estimated amount of data that an autonomous car will generate in about an hour and a half of driving – or the amount of time a typical person spends in their car each day."

She went on to say that as the industry moves toward fully autonomous cars, data presents a number of challenges for the entire global industry. The first challenge goes back to that original number: 4TB. The exponentially growing size of the data sets necessitates an enormous amount of compute capacity to organise, process, analyse, understand, share and store.

The need to train autonomous vehicles as quickly as possible presents another challenge. When new driving responses or situations are identified, machine learning, simulation and algorithm improvements must happen almost instantly and updated driving models must be pushed to the cars immediately once available.

There’s also the matter of data protection and what that means for consumers to eventually trust the autonomous experience.

Finally, says Winter, the data challenge grows over time as small fleets of vehicles eventually become hundreds of millions of vehicles. The ability to make this happen comes only through the ability to process increasingly larger data sets.

Winter added, "No one company can tackle these data challenges on its own. The fastest way to solve the autonomous driving data challenge is through industry collaboration. While there’s a lot of work to do to deliver fully autonomous vehicles by 2021, I am confident that by working with the industry and our partners, together we can get it done."

In fact, segment leaders like Maruti Suzuki, Tata Motors and Hero MotoCorp have reported de-growth of 34.3 per cent, 45 per cent and 20 per cent, respectively giving a clear indication of a prolonged slowdown in the sector.